National Defence Minister David McGuinty at the U.S.-Canada Summit in Toronto on Wednesday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Defence Minister David McGuinty defended a growing partnership with the United States on President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defence shield, saying Canada and the U.S. will have mere minutes to respond to the latest generation of incoming threats from “malign state actors.”
Mr. McGuinty didn’t use the term Golden Dome in his remarks, but instead said Canada is “talking to the United States now about what we call a continental shield, because we’re going to need one.”
The minister spoke at a Toronto conference on Canada-U.S. relations on Wednesday, one day after Mr. Trump announced Canada is collaborating with the U.S. on his ambitious and potentially expensive project to connect the U.S.’s air defence systems and expand them, including space-based interceptors that could shoot down missiles.
Canada has been working for years to prepare for Golden Dome, Air Force general says
“We may have three-and-a-half or four minutes to be able to respond to the kind of capabilities that we’re seeing now that are out there – that a number of states possess,” Mr. McGuinty told the Toronto conference.
Canada, he said, “needs to be able to detect what’s coming at us” from abroad.
Mr. Trump’s comments about collaborating with Canada on his Golden Dome project were noteworthy because Ottawa has not explicitly announced that it has agreed to join the project.
“We’ll be working together on a Golden Dome for the two countries,” Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday at the White House.
In May, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada was in discussions over the Golden Dome and talked up the proposal, saying it was a “good idea to have protection against missiles in place for Canadians.” As recently as Oct. 1, Mr. Trump had suggested Canada would have to buy its way into the project.
A Canadian government official said Wednesday that at the moment Ottawa and Washington are using different terms for this effort to boost and integrate missile defence: continental missile shield in Canada and Golden Dome in the United States.
The official, whom The Globe is not identifying because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the matter, compared it to how Canada calls the trilateral trade pact with the U.S. and Mexico the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, while the U.S. refers to it to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.
Any continental missile shield will include defence against ballistic missiles. In 2005, former prime minister Paul Martin’s Liberal government rejected joining a U.S. ballistic missile defence system.
Posters for the proposed Golden Dome before an event at the White House in May.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
Mr. McGuinty, speaking to the Toronto conference, which was hosted by BMO and Eurasia Group, said Mr. Carney authorized him to discuss every kind of missile defence, abandoning the Martin government’s restrictions.
He originally announced the authorization in July during his first trip to the North American Aerospace Defence Command, or NORAD, headquarters.
“The Prime Minister told me a few months ago that the freeze on conversation with the United States about a system to respond was lifted,” Mr. McGuinty told the conference.
He portrayed collaborating with Mr. Trump on the Golden Dome project as a natural offshoot of NORAD, whose mandate is detecting and warning about attacks against North America from aircraft, missiles or space.
Mr. McGuinty made no mention of a potential price tag for joining the Golden Dome, but in 2022, Canada pledged to spend $40-billion over 20 years on helping to modernize NORAD, including with new radar and detection systems.
He said Canada and the U.S. are still working out how a continental missile shield would function within existing arrangements.
“So the question is: How do we operationalize that? And that’s exactly the kind of conversations going on now with the United States,” Mr. McGuinty said.
“What does it look like? How will it be constituted? What part of it will be Canada’s? How will it be operationalized under the context of NORAD?” he added.
Mr. Carney’s minority government doesn’t need the support of opposition parties to expand co-operation with the U.S., but he will need some of their votes to pass his fall budget.
The Bloc Quebecois said it doesn’t have enough information yet to determine whether it supports a continental missile shield.
“While we support the need for a better missile defence system, we can’t see how we can support a project on which we have next to zero information or any official cost estimation,” said Julien Coulombe-Bonnafous, spokesperson for the Bloc.
Opinion: Canada should firmly reject Trump’s ludicrous Golden Dome plan
Interim NDP Leader Don Davies rejected participation in the Golden Dome. “Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile scheme is absurdly expensive and in total contradiction to Carney’s pledge to Canadians during the election to reduce military and economic integration with the United States,” he said in a statement.
“At a time when Trump is threatening Canadian sovereignty, Canada should be pursuing stronger and more diversified domestic defence policies, not ones that leave us increasingly vulnerable to American control,” Mr. Davies said.
Andrea Charron, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, said the idea behind the Golden Dome or a continental missile shield is integrated air and missile defence: weaving multiple air defence systems – radars, sensors and interceptors – into a single networked command and control system to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness.
It’s what Israel has with its “Iron Dome” and what the NATO military alliance is attempting to accomplish in Europe.
The system aims to provide layers of defence to safeguard critical civilian infrastructure, such as ports, electrical grids and rail links, as well as defence infrastructure including ammunition depots and bases, said Prof. Charron, who recently published an analysis of the Golden Dome and integrated air and missile defence for the Conference of Defence Associations Institute.
In the analysis, she said the Golden Dome plan would rely on NORAD, which provides military assets to detect fixed wing and cruise missile attacks.
“Given the status quo, Canada would be part of Golden Dome whether formally included or not,” she said. That’s because the fastest avenue of approach to hit U.S.-based targets is over Canada’s Arctic and NORAD assets, including the North Warning System, and future over-the-horizon radar systems are crucial to detecting threats.
Sensors are already located in Canada for NORAD’s detection mandate. Prof. Charron said assets such as ground-based air interceptors, as well as air-to-air and ground-to-air systems would be needed to protect critical infrastructure in addition to big international events such as the upcoming FIFA World Cup.
The Canadian Army used to have tactical air defence anti-tank systems, known as ADATS, acquired in 1989. These were last used to provide protection from air threats during the 2002 G8 summit in Alberta before being withdrawn from service.
If Canada were to formally reject participation in the Golden Dome, she said, the U.S. could end up deploying over-the-horizon radar and assets such as ground-based air interceptors or air-to-air and ground-to-air systems near the Canada-U.S. border.
Prof. Charron said it’s possible under such as scenario the U.S. might also consider walking away from NORAD, insisting the Golden Dome would take over the warning and defeat functions of NORAD. Although, she said, such a unilateral approach would fly in the face of the original logic that led to the creation of NORAD in 1957.